Crackulous cracks iPhone apps with one button press

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Cracking apps from the App Store isn’t anything new, but a new release of the cracking tool Crackulous has now made the process open to the public and incredibly simple to do.{ad}

Originally the Crackulous project was started by a hacker called SaladFork and wasn’t made publicly available. A few people had access to it, but it wasn’t an application that was readily available. Development then switched to a someone going by the name of Angel and has now been publicly released as version 0.9. On top of that, Crackulous is to become an open source project meaning anyone can contribute and improve its functionality.

Crackulous has the ability to make a major impact on the number of cracked apps that are being used and shared on the iPhone and iPod touch. That isn’t just because it is now freely available to download by anyone, but also because it is so simple to use being an iPhone app itself. You literally buy an application from the App Store, press a single button, and the app is cracked and ready to share.

Crackulous will be released as open source software. You heard me right, I’m going to be releasing all the source code used to create Crackulous. Additionally, I’ve filled the source code heavily with comments explaining exactly what it’s doing and how it’s doing it. My hope is that Crackulous can be a learning resource for all the prospective iPhone developers out there, and will be able to revolutionize the cracking scene by producing a standard for application quality and functionality that can easily be reproduced to great effect.

You can see just how easy Crackulous is to use by watching this YouTube video of it in action.

Matthew’s Opinion
The level of piracy on any platform is governed by a number of factors. A major one of those factors is ease of use. Copying a game for the Nintendo 64 and Nintendo consoles before it was difficult because you couldn’t get the cartridges. The PS2 used to be easy to run copied games on because of MOD chips, but they are now a lot more difficult to find or illegal is come countries. DS games are copied often because it is still quite easy to get hold of a cartridge and fill it with downloaded games.

With the public release of Crackulous including a GUI that makes cracking and copying as simple as you could be made, we can probably expect to see a lot more copying going on. iPhone owners no longer need to do any work to give their friends a copy of an app, just download, run Crackulous, and share.

There is an upside to Crackulous being made public and going open source, however. It will give the engineers at Apple full access to the source code meaning they may be able to block its operation or change the protection on apps enough to make it stop working.